This chapter unpacks the book’s two-fold concern with ‘narrative’: The study of narrative is the empirical focal point for exploring US defense policymaking in the context of the end of the Cold War and, developing a narrative mode of knowing, it is also the methodological cornerstone of how this is done. Looking more closely at the process of reconstituting meaning in relation to the international security environment after a dominant storyline has suddenly become invalid gives a snapshot of the narrative politics that precede the strategic use of security stories to shape political agendas and behavior. This shifts analytic attention beyond narrative purpose and intention toward discursive processes of forming and becoming, in which materiality intra-acts with narrative development. As the chapter demonstrates, a narrative analysis is a way of understanding (inter)national politics that allows us to study security in motion rather than through static outcomes.